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Mice

small rodent of the genus Mus

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and silver eye.

A mouse (plural: mice) is a small mammal belonging to the order of rodents, characteristically having a pointed snout, small rounded ears, and a long naked or almost hairless tail. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (Mus musculus). It is also a popular pet. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are also common. They are known to invade homes for food and occasionally shelter.

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

Rats and mice are not generally regarded as pets, but as pests; they have few defenders. Yet the pain a rat or a mouse feels is every bit as real as that of any pet. In laboratories, they suffer, as anybody who has heard them moan, cry, whimper and even scream knows. The experimenters dissimulate about this by insisting that they are merely vocalising.

We cannot model everything in the mouse. If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can't do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos.

Mice are the key model we use to study mammalian development and we extrapolate from mice to humans. This work tells us that the extrapolation can be unreliable. I’m not saying that all work in mice doesn’t apply in humans, but there are fundamental differences we need to be wary of.

"Once on a time there was a mouse," quoth she,
"Who sick of worldly tears and laughter, grew
Enamoured of a sainted privacy;
To all terrestrial things he bade adieu,
And entered, far from mouse, or cat, or man,
A thick-walled cheese, the best of Parmesan."